Taking up the baton passed by Gail (who received it from Gwen, and who knows where previously) I will do my best to keep this meme alive at least one more round.

Number of books I own:

About 2500. On the one hand: too many for the shelf space; on the other: never enough.

Last book I bought:

Something To Declare by Julian Barnes — a remainder of the US hardcover edition, to replace a copy of the Canadian edition (which was only released in paperback). Replacing paperbacks with hardcovers is another sign of aging, I suppose, an indication that I accept the fact I’ve settled down. I imagine that this “upgrade” impulse is why Everyman’s Library, and Modern Library have both been revived.

Last book I read:

John Berger’s here is where we meet — in my opinion any new book from Berger is a cause for celebration, and two of the pieces in this book are among the best he has ever written; reason enough on their own to check it out. Need another reason? There’s a recipe for sorrel soup woven into one of the stories; I picked up the ingredients yesterday…

Five books that mean a lot to me:

1) Fairy tales from many sources — The Brothers Grimm and Mopsa the Fairy; Hans Christian Andersen, and the colour books of Andrew Lang. I began with the family set of The Junior Classics published in 1912, “ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age”. Volume 1 was “Fairy and Wonder Tales”; Volume 2 was “Folk Tales and Myths”. You could not ask for a better start on any reading life, for everything else follows from these.

2) Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages, “the exciting adventures of two boys in the woods” — ten years old in Mrs. Slessor’s class and we each had to pick a book to do a Book Report on. The first time I’d ever had to do a Book Report and what the heck did I know about Book Reports? Figured there’d be a test about it so I read that book as hard as I’d ever read anything in my life. Sat at the kitchen table with a pad of paper beside me, practically trying to memorize the whole damn thing.

What a wonderful book, my favorite for many years: the story of Sam and Yan exploring the Ontario woods of the late 1800s. There are full-page and marginal drawings full of Indian lore: how to make rubbing sticks for fire-making, patterns for teepees and Ojibwa moccasins, sketches to help in identifying plants (Indian cucumber, Jack in the Pulpit, Sassafras, Orange Jewelweed); diagrams that showed how to stuff an owl or make an Indian war bonnet. I learned how to measure the width of a river without having to cross it, a skill I’ve never forgotten (or had to use it either, but no matter: I could if needed).

3) Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — it’s something involving frequencies, and wavelengths: read certain books at just the proper time and there’s a resonance, both the book and you becoming more than either of you would have been independently. The same book too early or too late will slip right past you unnoticed and away. On the Road was my bible through a key phase in my life. I know that if I were encountering it only now it would not have the same effect at all. Which is fine: it has left its mark on me, and still connects with new readers today.

4) The Times Atlas of the World, Comprehensive Edition — mine is the 6th edition, from 1980, and the lines with which we puny humans try to mark our borders have shifted in many significant ways since then. The golden age of atlases is over but there is no digital equivalent to the pleasures obtained on opening a volume of this size, reverently laying it on the table top, or kneeling beside it on the front room rug. Deciphering the tiny type that spells out the names of towns and islands you might journey to one day: Caballococha on the upper Amazon; Dairûd el Shirif on the Nile; Kapingamarangi in Polynesia; or Bagnols s/Cèze in France.

5) The last position of any list of favorites is the hardest one to fill, so I will let an assortment of them duke it out: Borge’s Labyrinths, or Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, or Berger’s To the Wedding, or something by Burroughs (Edgar Rice); or Annie Dillard’s Teaching A Stone to Talk, or Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, or something by Alexandre Dumas, père; or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes; or Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, or …

And, taking a personal stand against unsustainable growth, I’m only going to tag one person to follow this particular branch of the thread: Mr. Pudding Blues, in the hopes of provoking him to resuscitate his dormant blog.